


rituals for those off the bank of the river styx

by perennials



Category: Pandora Hearts
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-20
Updated: 2019-07-20
Packaged: 2020-07-09 03:14:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,347
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19880668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perennials/pseuds/perennials
Summary: Nothing broken cannot be fixed.





	rituals for those off the bank of the river styx

**Author's Note:**

> set before break loses his eyesight and everything else goes to shit

i.

Reim Lunettes has thin, metal-framed glasses and perfectly straight teeth and enjoys having a single cup of chamomile tea before bed, in a delicate-looking china teacup that once belonged to his mother. He rises by an unwritten law of nature at seven a.m. each morning and writes down a list of things to do for the day, which he folds into quarters and then tucks into his back pocket. He owns several sets of the Pandora uniform, one for each day of the week. Routines soothe him, the way sadness can be put on infinite delay if one constructs enough fences around it. In a similar way, he acknowledges that not everything in the universe can be planned for perfectly, but insists upon trying to do so anyway as a mild affront to high society and its sour, selfish ways. To Reim, nothing broken cannot be fixed.

Break admires this in the nasty, underhanded way that Break experiences all genuine human emotion, having relegated too much of his actual personality to a sideshow to remember how to extract it all at once anymore. It’s nothing quite as dramatic as self-hatred or long, horrific soliloquies with melancholy piano music in the background. He simply recognizes that Reim is the sort who will start hammering violently at the walls when the house falls apart, while Break will go looking for a back door. It is a fundamental difference in worldviews.

“Of course,” Reim says, looking pretty and refined in a pale blue undershirt. It is Saturday. That is the only reason he can still be found in his bedroom at an outrageous ten o’clock in the morning, tossed up between the sheets with a thick volume in his hands. He holds each page between his thumb and forefinger, careful not to ruin the soft parchment. “Unlike you, I do not have a tragic backstory to tell over white wine and the apocalypse.”

“Mm,” Break replies from the windowsill, non-committal. It is not low enough to reach from the ground, but he has hauled himself up onto it anyway, curling up crookedly against the stained glass. His skin is warm where the light glances off of it.

“I forgot to mention, but I have a meeting at twelve.” Reim turns the page.

Break climbs back over the mussed bed sheets and kisses him. 

ii.

Break’s world is simple. It is the size of Pandora’s box and the color of deep night, the sort in which the stars are not quite visible but linger just beneath the sky’s surface, like fish at the bottom of a large murky pond. In this box there are things like tea cakes and sugar cubes and violence. Within the tea cakes are small vials of poison, each containing a dosage large enough to kill several grown men. He does not eat the tea cakes all at once, but nibbles leisurely at their corners one by one. The violence sends him traipsing around Pandora like a funeral parlor, swaying bodily from side to side.

One of these days, he will die. Everyone who knows him knows this, and if they are sad, then they do not show it. He fears only that he will be pulled back into the abyss before he has fulfilled his duties; the thought haunts him, dragging his beaten body through nightmare-colored streets in his sleep. A mind that has been touched by the Will is never quite whole again afterwards, and Break knows this, too, intimately, watching as Reim’s chest rises and falls beside him. He hopes that Reim’s dreams, at least, are sweet enough to choke on.

iii.

When Break finally gets tired of pretending he’s all right and Reim finally gets tired of pretending he thinks Break’s actually all right they end up in some unoccupied room along the hallway in the eastern wing which sees less use than Sharon’s anti-aging supplements, and are not seen again for the better part of the next hour. Afterwards, Reim is the first to make the heinous journey back to civilization, re-adjusting the hem of his uniform three times in quick succession before he heads back down the stairs. Break peeks his head out a few minutes later and is immediately assaulted by Sharon, who bursts out of the shadows with teenage vibrancy.

“Your collar is crooked,” she tells him, smiling like she’s stumbled upon a particularly delightful secret. It is not that they had conspired to keep their relations discreet; privacy is simply something Reim likes and Break is used to. He stands there obediently and lets her make him look presentable. Satisfied with her work, Sharon takes a step back, hands on her hips, and nods in a proud, businesslike manner.

“Your face is crooked too.”

“Oh?” Break tilts his head to one side, grinning.

“You’re wearing a rather odd expression. I think I prefer it, actually.”

iv.

One morning, he catches him staring. What is it, Break asks. His shirt is still unbuttoned, barely hanging off of his torso. At this, Reim does not blush. He is no longer fifteen or twenty or even twenty-six and burning with strange and unspeakable feelings for the fallen knight who came back from the dead. The world is in pretty fucking lovely shambles, and Break will die eventually, but in this room with the tall, stained-glass windows and the bookshelf full of old stories, they have built half a sanctuary. The other half of it is practicality; he does not pay it any mind. Break is old and tired. He will be romantic when he wants to be. Can I touch your hair, Reim says, holding up his hand, and looks to Break for permission. He nods. Reim slides his palm under Break’s fringe and brushes it back gently. Break’s empty eye socket stares back at him. He leans down, here. Presses his lips to the skin above that blank space; an act of reverence. Break tells him his hair is getting longer and that he needs to cut it. Reim says he could grow it out.

When he dies, Break wants to die knowing that he has fulfilled all of his duties. At least this, then, he will have accomplished— he will be able to tell the smiling devil about the boy who kissed with the sun in his mouth. I will grow it out, he promises.

v.

Reim does not believe that broken things cannot be fixed because he does not aim to fix any of them. Rather, he contests the claim that things are broken to begin with.

When Break first appeared in the Rainsworth household he looked like he had seen god and then run away from him, slept facing the wall with his hands crossed in front of his face. It scared Reim to think that some people could exist with so much sadness. Like it lived inside of them.

These days, his laughter is high and sharp enough to be heard from the first floor up to the third, and he appears in unused fireplaces only to drag Reim down by the collar of his uniform and kiss him with a deceptively slow urgency. Reim will probably never tell him how handsome he looks in a suit with his hair swept up into a ponytail, red eye sharp as a knife and half-lidded, lovely beneath his long lashes. He is a private man, after all, and a practical one. He recognizes the transcendental nature of their narrow universe. But that does not mean he cannot hold each passing day in his hands like a precious gift and whisper to it, be kind, be forgiving, be gentle.

He would sacrifice the gold and expensive china of his childhood to the gods if it would buy him a fraction more of an hour in the unused room at the furthest corner of the eastern wing, in his place on the outskirts of the city, in the dark. Break would never let him do that, so he does not. But he does hold him. This, he does.

**Author's Note:**

> talk to me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/nikiforcvs) or [tumblr](http://corpsentry.tumblr.com/)
> 
> pandora hearts smashed my edgy kid heart to pieces when i was 11 and then again when i was 14. good times. written for @TOASTINATIR on twitter. i hope you enjoyed it as much as i enjoyed working on it!  
> thanks for reading to everyone, and i'll see you around
> 
> have a good one


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